having a great life in spite of everything

I’ve been trying to figure out a new cabling method, working a cable like a motif and starting it in the middle of a piece instead of from the beginning. So obviously you’d work a reverse stockinette background, then do stockinette at the start of the cable, but how would you start a second branch of the cable beginning from the same point? I picked up stitches for that from the back of the work, but I wasn’t sure how to write a pattern telling someone else to do that, and I was even less sure that it’d actually be successful for anyone else. I mean, it felt very like improvising.

I searched online and eventually found the solution in the form of Elsebeth Lavold and her book Viking Patterns For Knitting. And of course, her solution is to pick up stitches from the back of the work, just as I was doing. So, yay, my instincts were dead on! And then she takes it all further, so, yay again, I don’t have to figure out all these techniques for myself (whew!). I might have been able to do it, but it was going to take huge amounts of work and swatching. And I would have second-guessed it all constantly, that alone could have sunk the whole project. Sheesh, even with the help in this book I think this might be a long-term design project.

BTW, this book is AWESOME. It’s advanced cabling, and there’s a lot of stuff about the history of Viking art and cable design. If you want beginning knitting instructions or a book of patterns, don’t bother, this ain’t it. I’d say the best target audience here is geeky knit designers, or any serious cable knitters.